ads, riding easy, would come to
water. This was a negotiation which was better left to Honeypot and
Derry Down. If the water was black and peaty with a heavy smell of
rotting vegetation, the ponies knew it, but if they scented the fresh
rush of a hill burn, or the soft coolness of an arm of sandy-bottomed
loch, then Louis and Stair would suddenly feel the cool sluicing of
water about their legs, causing them to turn their pistol belts over
their shoulders, where Stair already carried his long-barrelled gun with
the stock upwards.

"We shall close upon them at the White Loch," said Stair, during one of
these pauses. "They have a long detour to make. I would rather have
waited till they had got to the crossing of the Tarf, but that is too
far for our beasts on these short nights of June."

(He meant the Wigtonshire Tarf, which comes from far Laggangairn and the
Bloody Moss, not the shorter, fiercer tributary of the Dee.)

"The White Loch be it," said Louis, for indeed it was all the same to
him. He was out to fight for Patsy, and fight he would. He did not care
what his grandfather might say, nor what penalties he might incur. What
Stair Garland was ready to do for Patsy, surely he had the better right
to be a partner in.

They drove through a herd of kyloes recently sent down from Highland
hills to try their luck on Galloway heather. The horns clicked sharply
together. There was a whisking scamper of hoofs as the beasts fled every
way, only to bunch anew a little farther out of the path of these wild
riders.

Now Stair and Louis found themselves on a kind of track, narrow and
stony underfoot. The blackfaced sheep of the hills had made it so, with
their little pattering trotters which dug out a stone at every step.
Above was a waste of boulder, grey teeth grinning through the black
heather. They began to see more clearly, for they were now far above the
mist, into which they would not again need to descend till they should
reach the White Loch and cut down to head off their prey, comfortably
rolling Gretnawards--a duke royal, a peer of the realm, and a spy with a
promise of fortune in his breastpocket, all looking after Patsy Ferris,
the daughter of the Picts, and drawn by Kennedy McClure's excellent pair
of horses along the best road in all the south country.

Sometimes a wilder track led Stair and Louis unbreathed across an open
moor, the path being too narrow to ride abreast, when it was the mare's
privilege to